Four years ago, the board of Institutional Real Estate, Inc. made a strategic decision to branch out to serve a broader market — the professionals advising the individual investor marketplace.

Research such as that outlined by Casey, Quirk & Associates and Merrill Lynch & Co. in their landmark study, The Brave New World: Winning Product Strategies for a Changing Global Market, built an almost irrefutably strong case for including alternatives in the portfolios of institutional and individual investors, alike. This was particularly true in the low-return, higher-risk environment that was emerging at the time, which, the report argued, was undermining the effectiveness of the long-held, traditional 60 percent equities/40 percent fixed-income allocations to which most investors and advisers had become accustomed. But the study also pointed out most individual investors were ill-equipped to make the appropriate asset-allocation decisions to diversify into alter